A decade of re-writing metrics of what we’re worth
As a data reporter I often look at all the ways in which we try to measure things in our world and what this way of slicing and dicing says about our values.
The metrics that we apply to the world in which we live matter. From the ways in which we categorize people by race all the way to how Facebook or Instagram measure affection through likes or hearts — all these things are a way to evaluate our existence, each with a different purpose.
Some of these metrics are out in the open for everyone to see. We can now arguably measure celebrity by the number of followers one that person’s Twitter account or Instagram account touts. We can tally up all the wealth of one person, subtract their debt, and thereby assign an actual dollar amount to their worth.
But then there are all the implicit metrics that folks apply the value of people. Often these metrics have to be reverse-engineered. Discrimination in arrests, which skews heavily towards black and brown folks, is something we can only determine by painstakingly auditing arrest records. There’s the way in which Hollywood implicitly uses colorism — this arbitrary measure of how much melanin is in one’s skin — as a way to measure how worthy people are of being part of the worlds they imagined, how worthy we were of being loved on-screen. Pay gaps, discrimination, lack of representation — these are all evidence of internalized, invisible metrics that powerful people applied to the human existence. They are something so powerful that, if we take them at face value, we run the risk of buying into them, too.
Yet, in the 2010s, as our understanding and use of the social web and everyday gadgets matured, something curious happened to a lot of these ‘standard’ metrics of our existence. In many ways, this past decade has been an act of unlearning old ways in which we were taught to evaluate our worth and going back to the drawing board to come up with new ones. For a lot of us in the margins — and in particular women and people of color — the past decade was a period of writing new contexts and guidelines in how to value ourselves after decades of either silently adopting or constantly struggling with the self-hatred we were taught thanks to the Internet.
Whether it’s the comforts of a group chat of like-minded people or the comment section of prominent figures that allowed for a safe discussion of topics we cared about, social media and our ever-more-dependent relationship with technology has placed the power of creating spaces where like-minded people can assemble into the palm of our hands. Tap, tap, tap — and suddenly there’s a Facebook group, an Instagram chatroom, a space for ideas digitally transmitted.
The social web is not one unified public forum. It is a multitude of publics that gather people around specific topics and identities. And while for some, this has led to hatred and radicalization, for others these groups became a space to really exist in our brown bodies and talk about our experiences in a way that does not require us to defend their validity in front of those who did not have those experiences.
And within these little universes that exist online and on the digital storage of our phones, each with their own set of rules and populations, we get to imagine a different society.
So what does it look like to be able to exist without having to explain oneself or make oneself smaller to mitigate the discomfort of those who did not have to live through the pain of one’s experience?
The past decade was a way for a lot of women, gender non-conformers, and people of color to acknowledge their experience with support, to grow stronger from this feeling of being seen and then, with this newfound stamina, to go back to the drawing board to start celebrating the glory of the once-and-for-so-long overlooked.
First we knocked down long-established marks of establishment. To see Beyonce be snubbed for Lemonade at the Grammys or the Oscars being “so white” two years in a row, led people to celebrate their black and brown heroes more raucously in the alternative online stadiums we built to gather around our own personal heroes.
On a personal level, we learned to re-contextualized all the metrics of worth of someone within the story of their life. Is it that they succeeded in part because of their circumstances — wealth, gender, the color of their skin, the inheritance of their privilege through intergenerational connects — or in spite of them? These new spaces allowed us to see ourselves within the larger value systems that govern our experiences and recognizing these value systems allowed us to rejigger what was saw as important, beautiful and inspiring. Our stories suddenly mattered more and accomplishment could no longer exist in isolation.
Fuck Weinstein and his Oscar-winning movies.
All hail Tarana Burke, AOC, Chanel Miller.
And then there were our bodies. In an extremely visual era, we celebrate that there are different kinds of beauty in different kinds of bodies more than ever. There’ve been movements to rid ourselves of unattainable beauty ideals before but in the age of the social web, imagery of differently bodied women and men abound and are easily accessible via Google. Over time, accounts were created to curate alternative ways to view beauty — accounts we can follow to curate our personal newsfeed of what we want to find beauty and through constant exposure eventually feel to be beautiful. Instead of taking in what we were visually given, the personal feed allowed us to redefine beauty.
But something else happened beyond those personal victories, too. This movement to re-classify whose lives get to matter has also gradually spilled over into the mainstream. The power of identification and the dollars attached to it, have certainly forced the hands of some big players — from Hollywood to the fashion industry to whom we elect.
